Archive for November 2014

Seminar starts out strong, ripping into the fabric of the business of teaching fiction writing with knife-edged one-liners and characters you love to despise; then, as the plot, the characterizations, and the theme take a hairpin turn, it emerges that, no, the teaching is not a scam after all, the students’ fiction has possibilities, and the characters are not what we thought them. All Rebeck’s hilarious savagery dissipates. Like Rebeck’s writing and show-running for the first season of TV’s Smash, it is a little too affectionate toward the business and the people in it to stay as scathing as Rebeck could and should keep it.

Our one-year-old son Matthew had a “language tape,” a VHS video transcription of the first three Muppet movies that I had made in the previous decade for his older brother and sister during a Muppet marathon on old Channel 45. It was complete with commercials and station breaks and really, really bad video, but it was perfect for Matt.

Posted on November 13, 2014, 11:29 pm, by Jack L. B. Gohn, under The Big Picture.

The biggest problem often is that “peoples” are theoretically guaranteed the right to divorce, but territory isn’t. Yet necessarily and thus inevitably, separating “peoples” wants to break off chunks of territory with them. And the United Nations Charter which guarantees the right to secede says nothing about how maps are redrawn. So what becomes of the map when one “people” decides to withdraw?